How Roger Waters’ Split From Pink Floyd Was Eventually Finalized

After years of bitter recrimination and mudslinging in the press, Pink Floyd buried the hatchet on Dec. 23, 1987, celebrating peace on Earth and goodwill to men by legally finalizing one of the most strongly contested breakups in rock 'n' roll history.

The exact date comes via Pink Floyd Online, who cite an agreement between quarreling ex-bandmates David Gilmour and Roger Waters that enabled the band to carry on without Waters – but stipulated that he'd need to receive royalties for the use of any images created during his tenure, which ended when he left the group in December 1985.

As Waters famously put it, Pink Floyd was "a spent force creatively" after 1983's The Final Cut, but his former partners clearly disagreed, soldiering on without him for 1987's massively successful A Momentary Lapse of Reason album, as well as a subsequent tour. Waters eventually pursued legal avenues while making his case in the court of public opinion, but neither outcome could have been entirely satisfactory for him; Lapse far outsold his own '87 release, Radio K.A.O.S., and while he did wind up getting what he referred to as "a slice" of the band's ongoing income, they proved rather decisively that they could keep going without him.

Tempers cooled in subsequent years, as Pink Floyd drew to a close with the release of 2014's Endless River. In fact, by then, relations between Waters and the rest of the band improved to the point that he and Gilmour actually started to seem friendly at times. Fans received a surprisingly sweet coda to the story in the form of their Live 8 reunion set in 2005. He later joined Waters on stage, too. Although it didn't lead to any new Pink Floyd tunes, seeing the former litigants smiling on stage was its own reward.